Peter Hitchens on what he views as the centre left's domination of British politics:
Our political parties are corpses and democracy as we used to know it is quite dead
Peter Hitchens
I expect the Labour conference this week will be very like a funeral I once attended, in ice-cold rain, under black skies, in the shadow of a Victorian prison, where the heavy clay soil was so wet that the grave had to be held open with steel props in case it closed up with a gigantic squelch before the final prayers were over.
In short, it will be so gloomy that it will almost be funny.
Like the world banking system, Labour has gone belly up and can survive only if it is rescued by outsiders and entirely rebuilt.
What’s more, this is the second time this has happened to the decrepit party in two decades.
Two years ago, it seemed invincible and it was the Tories who were a despised and failed brand.
Now it’s indefensible and the Tories have mysteriously become, if not popular, then bearable. What happened? Why the sudden, violent swing?
The cold, miserable truth is that both our major political parties are corpses, their original purposes long forgotten, their loyal members driven away or sidelined, their traditional voters taken for granted.
Every so often, by a mysterious process, one of them is declared electable and the other is declared unelectable.
And we, the voters, do as we are told. By whom? For what purpose?
Labour really died around 1983, in the years of Michael Foot.
It was then invaded by young men and women, sometimes smirking, sometimes scowling, bleeping with the latest electronic devices and attired in costly suits, accompanied by spivs with suitcases of bank notes.
It was like watching a stately, traditional company being taken over by asset-strippers.
Its older inhabitants underwent a callous process of humiliation and scorn, while its honoured brand-name was turned to other uses by people who had never much liked it anyway.
Now that’s over. What began in the age of the bleeper has ended in the age of the BlackBerry.
The costly suits and the dodgy donors have migrated, for the moment, to the Tory Party. Who knows where they will go next? Back to Labour? Or somewhere else?
Funnily enough, those Tories who have much of a memory will remember their party’s similar death.
They will recall Blackpool in the autumn of 2003 - unbelievably, only five years ago - when poor Iain Duncan Smith sat alone, much as Gordon Brown does now, listening to the whispers of a thousand plotters planning to get rid of him.
He knew, as Mr Brown does, that he was finished.
But, as the son of a Spitfire ace who had himself been raised in the military code, he saw no honourable way to go except to wait for his enemies to come and kill him. This they duly did.
The assassination of IDS was one of the strangest and most important moments in British politics.
IDS did actually represent the force and mind of the Tory Party, bewildered and demoralised, after its wholly unjust 2001 defeat.
He became leader because none of the supposed ‘big beasts’ of Toryism liked Tory voters or party members, or shared their views.
And most of the medium-sized beasts preferred to go away and make some money, rather than have pails of lukewarm swill chucked over them by a media who were then wholly in the pocket of New Labour, just as they are now in David Cameron’s pocket.
What happened next is so fascinating that everyone missed its significance.
The Michael Howard palace revolution against IDS was a blatant takeover of a Right-wing party by the ‘Centre-Left’ establishment.
It was played out almost entirely on the airwaves and in the newspapers. MPs did what they were told by the media.
It was made easier because the ‘Centre-Left’ media have always inaccurately portrayed Mr Howard as being Right-wing.
He isn’t. He is actually a conventionally liberal career politician of the sort you find near the top of both big parties.
After IDS had been utterly destroyed, it was made plain to all Tory MPs (with the help of the media elite) that they had better not stand against Mr Howard for the leadership.
So nobody did. And he was ‘elected’ unopposed in a way that makes Vladimir Putin look like a fervent democrat.
Compare the absence of media fuss about this with the bitter media condemnation of Labour for installing Gordon Brown without a vote.
The Tory Party had been put into receivership. Its supposed owners - those who voted for it and supported it - had lost control over it.
The ‘Centre-Left’ establishment, Britain’s permanent government of media types, politicised moneybags and their approved pundits, had taken over, and their task was to make it as unconservative as possible, as quickly as possible.
Mr Howard made it plain that his coronation was the end of anything remotely Right-wing.
He ruthlessly sacked two candidates, Danny Kruger in Sedgefield and Adrian Hilton in Slough, for making apparently Right-wing remarks that could be (and of course were) misrepresented in the ‘Centre-Left’ media.
Then he went a great deal further, and sacked Howard Flight, the serving MP for Arundel, for a similar offence.
Mr Howard almost certainly had no legal power to do this, but once again the ‘Centre-Left’ media decided it was not a scandal.
The imposition of the liberal careerist David Cameron on the Tory Party, once Michael Howard had finished being the establishment’s caretaker, was also achieved by the ‘Centre-Left’ media.
They adopted Mr Cameron as their candidate and propelled him to victory despite a very poor start to his campaign and an equally poor performance on live TV, later on, up against his more conservative rival, David Davis.
You’ll notice that it is the same people, that ‘Centre-Left’ combo of media types, who did a similar job on the Labour Party back in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
Interestingly, that revolution was much more about image than about reality.
The Tories have genuinely dropped most of their remaining conservative positions.
Labour remains a very Left-wing party. Most of its radical 1983 manifesto has in fact now been implemented, though in more subtle ways.
The only lasting deep change in Labour policy since the Eighties has been the party’s lobotomised conversion to support for the EU and globalism in general.
Nationalisation hadn’t mattered for years, the old industrial unions were as dead as the industries they helped to ruin, and the H-Bomb wasn’t an issue any more.
Labour’s real ‘Clause Four’ - its bilious hatred of selective state schools - remains untouched. What’s more, it has now been openly adopted by the Tories as well.
The rule nowadays is that you cannot become the government unless you bow to the views of the ‘Centre-Left’ media elite, especially the broadcast media elite.
That elite speaks for the 1968 generation which fanned out in the Seventies into the civil service, education, entertainment, the law, the arts, rock music and - above all - the media.
We no longer have elections where two evenly matched parties go into a fair contest with competing ideas and it is over only when the last vote is counted.
Instead, we have wild swings in which the approved party goes into the Election with a giant poll lead and then wins the Election with a mad, crushingly enormous majority over the unapproved party.
And the winner is always the ‘Centre-Left’, which claims to be moderate but is in fact a swirling cauldron of wild Sixties Leftism - anti-British, anti-family, anti-Christian, anti-education and pro-crime.
But if you dare to oppose this stuff, they’ll call you an extremist.
British democracy, as we used to know it, is quite dead. It just needs to have a new funeral every few years.
12 comments:
I mean, really... this is only here to demonstrate that Peter Hitchens has no grip on reality, right? It's a hysterical parody of blind extremism detached from any kind of relationship with the world we live in. Like a cross between Eeyore and the major from Fawlty Towers, a decrepit old looney ranting away in his senillity. Right??
It's barely worth contesting the things written because almost every paragraph is so devoid of logic and foundation as to be incomprehensible. Just a couple of token examples:
Labour remains a very Left-wing party. Most of its radical 1983 manifesto has in fact now been implemented, though in more subtle ways.
Such as? Re-nationalisation? Disarmament? repeal of anti-union legislation? er, none of the above??
Hitchens says these... the very basis of the '83 manifesto... are passe, and tries to hang Labour's ideology on the 'bilious hatred of selective state schools'.
Except that Labour has, if anthing, encouraged more specialisation and selectivity and proto-independence within the state sector than past Conservative administrations did... 19 years of Tory rule didn't re-instate grammar schools as the norm, but equally didn't set up faith schools, technical schools, music schools, sports colleges, etc, able to pick and choose their intake. Even state Grammar schools have been left alone by Labour, and the private sector has been completely unaffected by 11 years of Labour rule. Hitchens comments are not supported by anything resembling evidence.
The perennial complaint of the old left is that new labour is centre-right, which Hitchens presumably knows and is trying, therefore, to be controversial... or more like trying that familiar right-wing ploy, of claiming everything has gone soft left, is going to hell in a handcart, and that views like 'send the darkies home' and 'lock up sodomites and sinlge parents' are really the mainstream of centrist politics if it weren't for Political Correctness destorying our values... anything, in fact, to shift the goalposts over to the right touchline and claim it's the middle ground....
...The battle within the intellectual left is between statism and 'third-way' stakeholderism, and between absolute equality and equality of opportunity as the desired outcome.
There is NOTHING in the last 12 years of labour administration to support what Hitchens writes here, regardless of whether one is pro or anti the current and former labour PM's... there are very few echoes of Labour c 1983 in Labour today... which is either why Labour has won elections, or why it has failed to keep its popularity, depending on who you believe, but you'll have to go a long way to find anyone to gree with Hitchens that Labour 83=Labour 08.
A second little nugget:
We no longer have elections... instead, we have wild swings in which the approved party goes into the Election with a giant poll lead and then wins the Election with a mad, crushingly enormous majority over the unapproved party.
Er, when? Wild swings? maybe one in 1997, after several years of dominance in the polls... but the Tories never recovered from Black Wednesday, early in Major's second ministry... hardly wild swings then, more a steady and continuous movement away from the Tories that began in 1992 and only found expression at a general election 5 years later (but check out the loca and Euro elections 92-97)
Since then, there's never been a wild swing towards the Tories throughout the Blair years... its only now, 18 months into Brown's 1st ministry, that we've seen a year of progressive movement in the polls towards the Tories...
..and even that coincides, almost to the week, with the beginnings of the impact of the US financial meltdown on the British market (Northern Rock, Sept 07)...
..so, no wild swings anywhere, then... and as for 'the approved party' winning its crushing majority, no more under Blair than under Thatcher, and arguably there's nothing much to be surprised about when the public and the popular press are broadly in alignment... doesn't necessarily prove causality, more like reflection of the same events in Westminster...
..so, no wild swings, no real change in election patterns, no evidence to support what Hitchens asserts... in fact, there's nothing more than hot air and bile in every word...
Ho-hum. One could go through any given piece by Peter Hitchens, line by line, and point to its unsupportability, its lack of any basic evidence, its repetition of prejudices that would disgrace your average freemarketeer or libertarian...
...but really, what's the point? Hitchens has nothing to say, and he says it very badly.
Hitchens and Melanie Phillips would be a perfect couple. Let's marry them off in a good Christian union, and send them to some remote island where they can keep foreigners out, respect the sanctity of church and state, and can rant the days away in peace and seclusion, where nobody else needs to dignify their noxious nonsense with a response.
Not sure you'd get Mel to agree to a Christian wedding...
And Joshua Rozenberg would surely object too.
"Labour remains a very Left-wing party. Most of its radical 1983 manifesto has in fact now been implemented, though in more subtle ways."
Such as? Re-nationalisation? Disarmament? repeal of anti-union legislation? er, none of the above??'
Wembley 2.28pm
I just checked out the Labour 1983 manifesto online. It's interesting, although there's much that certainly wasn't implemented - withdrawing from the EU for instance - the following commitments were all in the 1983 manifesto and were all subsequently implemented by New Labour (incidently, some of which I think are good things):
Ban Fox hunting.
Devolve power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The minimum wage.
Freedom of information act.
Massive increase of spending on NHS and State Education.
Positive discrimination legislation.
Equal Pay Acts.
Increase spending on welfare and benefits.
Sure start pre school care scheme.
Reforming and removing legislative powers from the House of Lords.
But these aren't the things which were considered radical or 'particularly' left wing.... it was the anti-europe, anti-NATO, disarmament stance that really caught the attention, particularly in the wake of the falklands war.
Ive blogged before that constitutional reform would be seen as the transforming legacy of Blair's 1st ministry, but even then devolution was an on-going issue since well before the 1979 Scottish referendum. Banning foxhunting is urban/ideological, interventionist perhaps but not particularly 'left wing' (Lenin observed that Britain was the only place where hunting shooting fishing were considered aristocratic, not artisan, pastimes.
Even something as 'lefty' as the minimum wage is not so, really... after all, it is commonplace throughout most capitalist democracies, including those such as the US which have a much smaller regard for big government. Equally, Surestart is a mirror of the US Headstart programme, and is more a continuation of the pre-Thatcherite Robbins-era consensus of education.
Why should it be a surprise that the Labour party c 1983 belileved in many of the same things as the Labour party c 1997? But the policies implemented hardly constitue a radical left wing agenda..... no abolition of selective or private schools, no reinstatement of Union power, no abolition of private funding of political parties, low income tax levels, no punitive moves to increase inheritance tax, no nationalisation of infrastructural businesses, and so on, and so on.
no, I insinuate that it is a standard ploy of the right to present extremist views as mainstream (usually alongside phrases such as 'common sense' or 'traditional values'), and so to shift the centre-point of the debate over to their 'side'.
The counterpoint to this tactic is to present extremist leftwing views as the mainstream of the left.
"..so, no wild swings, no real change in election patterns, no evidence to support what Hitchens asserts..."
Wembley 2.28Pm
No wild swings, really? Even in 1983 Labour could rely on regional support (the party still retained more than 200 seats). Labour's in uncharted territory now. There's barely a seat they could confidently expect to retain in a by election. And if Labour can't hold on to Glasgow East the political weather has definitely changed. If that isn't evidence of real change in voting patterns I'd like to bloody see what is!
Peter Hitchens a defence:
I think the problem people have with this piece lies in the notoriously slippery definitions of left and right. Peter Hitchens is a Conservative of the very old school; a patriot, a defender of a Constitutional Royalty and the House of Lords and a staunch supporter of the union (British NOT European). He's a cultural and social conservative rather than an economic liberal, that's why he views devolution and the house of lords reform as more anti conservative (i.e left wing) than nationalisation (I don't think he views nationalisation as always a bad thing or even automatically a left wing thing, he thinks the de-nationalisation of the railways was a bad idea for example). This is why he's critical of Thatcher and Thatcherism which he blames for a lot of social ills.
On Wembley's point about selection in schools, it is true that New Labour have allowed all kinds of selection in the new Academies and faith schools, but for Hitchens the one selection they don't allow is the only one that really matters and that's academic selection.
Now, I don't know whether New Labour and the Conservatives are centre left, centre right or just centre, but what I do agree with Hitchens on is that the two main parties have never been more alike and that this is a problem in an adverserial system such as ours where we expect the two parties to argue from different positions. In the Observer today Michael Gove said that the Conservatives would welcome James Purnell, Andrew Adonis, Hazel Blears and Ruth Kelly in to their party and that there was nothing Adonis had done in Government that he would disagree with. I find this quite extraordinary and points to The Conservatives in power being a more Blairite version of New Labour. This isn't at all healthy for politics.
"no, I insinuate that it is a standard ploy of the right to present extremist views as mainstream (usually alongside phrases such as 'common sense' or 'traditional values'), and so to shift the centre-point of the debate over to their 'side'."
Wembley71
Yes and the flipside of this tactic is to present an opinion one opposes as extremist, dangerous and as far away from the mainstream as possible; It's a very effective way to censor debate.
Peter Hitchens replies to his critics at Conservative Home and expounds on his argument that the Conservative Party is no longer conservative:
""May I respond to some of the criticisms of my views levelled by Tim and by contributors to this site? I'll try to be concise, but many important subjects arise here.
First, there's the question of 'true conservatism'. One of the problems with the Tory Party is that it was proud, for many years, of being "a disposition, not a dogma". This was a good thing when it did not have dogmatic opponents. But, confronted with the dogmas of Fabianism, egalitarianism and now Gramscian/Marcusian cultural revolution, it is a grave weakness.
If conservatives cannot be bothered to understand, analyse or oppose these forces, then they will be overwhelmed by them. This is the reason for the famous 'ratchet', under which Tory governments never reverse any substantial part of Labour's changes, and instead learn to live in an increasingly left-wing state until there is nothing let to conserve. It is also the reason why so many Tory governments have been 'in office, but not in power'.
I would describe the evidence of 'true conservatism' provided by Tim Montgomerie as little more than a series of catch-penny gimmicks. The fundamental problem of the police and the criminal justice system is that they have been robbed of their punitive and deterrent purpose by the imposition of Fabian social democratic ideas on them.
The fundamental problem of the state schools is that they cannot simultaneously be tools of egalitarianism and good schools. Steering round the edge of this problem with voucher schemes and special schools for the children of pushy parents (which is basically what the Gove scheme is) will not deal with the difficulty. Nor will a necessarily small number of academies (whose alleged wondrousness is so far unmeasured by serious research).
As for bringing spending 'under control', we all want to do this in theory. But unless we are prepared to dismantle the immense, social democratic state created since the war, we will be borne onwards into ever-greater spending whether we like it or not.
The difference between Mr Cameron's position and that of proper conservatism is not (as some of my critics like to claim) a matter of degree. It's not that I'm a maximalist who will only be satisfied with a whole loaf and so refuses half a loaf. It's that the two approaches are wholly different.
[...]
A small digression here. I am chided for having once been a Trotskyist, by people who think my change of mind since my revolutionary days is comparable with Miss Bagshawe's ramble along the ill-defined border between Blairism and Cameroonism.
Well, first, I resigned my membership of the International Socialists in 1975, when I was 24, which I guess is before quite a lot of my critics were born. Let us see where you all are, 33 years hence. Second, I joined the IS because I was a revolutionary Marxist, and it was a revolutionary Marxist organisation. I didn't think it was more or less the same as the Tories and then discover I was mistaken only after listening to a Paul Foot harangue. I knew what I was doing, and now acknowledge it as a grave mistake. I left it because I changed my mind, fundamentally and utterly, and have continued to move away from leftist positions (via the Labour Party and the Tory Party) ever since, as anyone who reads my books and articles must know.
[...]
In the section on the EU, I also note that Tim simply fails to deal with my point about the two Tory Euro-MPs who mysteriously failed to appear at the Bruges Group meeting. In my view, the word 'Eurosceptic' means " a person who adopts anti-EU rhetoric in opposition, and then surrenders to the EU in government" . This is inevitable. You cannot be in the EU and not run by it, any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. If you don't like being run by it, you must leave, as all serious students of the subject long ago realised. I don't think there's any serious dispute about which side of this fence Mr Cameron is on.
Two final points. First, I believe a serious conservative programme, on national independence, crime, disorder, immigration, genuine welfare reform and education would sweep the country, despite the rage and fury of the left-wing media elite whose prejudices the current Tory leadership mistakes for public opinion.'
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